White, Blue

In intimate axes
of cerulean and white
dead trees foreground
an Everest in ice.

How tall runs that ridge?
Surely to Heaven
as its eye is on the Seine,
droves of magnate ice.

Freshness in an azure breath
blows the crispen wind
green and brown are vestiges
blue is the breeze and ice.

Treatises wonder:
where could the Sun be?
It is like the trees and wind,
blue and buried in ice.

Frankly all the coldness
arrests the warmth in me.
I feel blue and white,
another floe of ice.

Maybe I lie restless
on the bottom of the Seine
blue eyes wide and searching
their whiteness shines like ice.

Contemplating air on water
white in blue
drifting towards the surface
bubbles like depurposed ice.

Finally the colors seem lonely
blue craven for green or yellow
and white is nothing without black
--its hard to be happy, among so much ice.

Claude Monet "The Breakup of the Ice" 1880

Recital in a Frozen Hall

Seldom do the birds call when a sallow blanket falls
down the river fluid airscape of our Earth's most barren halls.
Fie to falling snowflakes chip the egret or the crow,
and the relics of November scoured
in glazen thick of snow,
each the birch's frozen paper
or the spruce's needle locked,
in a lattice water sheath that sparkles,
craven of the glow,
and a wind that whistles bleakly making needles of the snow,
and so now I see a frozen cloud, hanging fore my nose,
as the frigid apparition goes,
I go,
and a new one stands in spruce-birch stands,
listening for birds,
Winter taking breath and being,
leaving just these words.

Recital in a Frozen Hall (prose)

Seldom do the birds call when a sallow blanket falls down the river fluid airscape of our Earth's most barren halls. Fie to falling snowflakes chip the egret or the crow, and the relics of November scoured in glazen thick of snow, each the birch's frozen paper or the spruce's needle locked, in a lattice water sheath that sparkles, craven of the glow, and a wind that whistles bleakly making needles of the snow, and so now I see a frozen cloud, hanging fore my nose, as the frigid apparition goes, I go, and a new one stands in spruce-birch stands, listening for birds, Winter takes my breath and being, leaving just these words.

Lessons from A Plastic Brain

Posit a reduction,
assume a position,
reduce this position,
now you've reached a base
or low level of realism.

Redact the diction,
rearrange the drama,
verge on mental recital,
very soon you can taste
a vice or a syrupy potion.

Suspend your knowledge,
Suspect your seldom
seen but heard wisdom
and eventually a knit garland
will bridge the world and you.

Cut the tie,
mold the opalescent matter,
form your own brain
to your specifications, and let
the regions that digitize experience die.

Let your diet
dictate how your heart
opens and breathes
so it never has to rot inside out
from sweetness perspiring.

Heave a breath
for each moment
you jog your mind
and find a fire you thought
was long burned out and dead.

Very differently
constructed hearts seem
to radiate different auras,
so let yours radiate how it might
and find its own way.

Eat the honey
hand to mouth like
a bear in clear summer
and let the sweetness drip down your throat
into your thoracic cavity.

A list of newest things
is almost past its use
once its been written,
so find an older one
and have it rewritten in Sanskrit.